![]() The score by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe is refreshingly subtle for an action comedy. Visually “Megamind” is immaculately sleek and gracefully enhanced by 3-D. These references are just the outer layer of a compulsively referential screenplay that tries so hard, it sounds like a classroom smart aleck reeling off answers before the questions are finished. Megamind is a master of disguises who in his funniest incarnation becomes a parody of Marlon Brando in “Superman.” Fragments of vintage hits include AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” (symbolizing evil) and Minnie Riperton’s chirpy “Lovin’ You,” (good). Typical of DreamWorks Animation toons, “Megamind” is crammed with pop culture references and jokes invented to show how up-to-the-minute it is in its slang and encyclopedic comic-book know-how. When the preening, flexing Tighten tries to wow her by repeatedly dropping her from on high, then swooping down to scoop her up at the last second, she is irritated by his showy stunts. The movie’s Lois Lane is Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey), a beautiful and fearless television news reporter coveted by Megamind, Metro Man and Tighten alike. The voice of common sense in Megamind’s mentally overstimulated world, the character isn’t as a sharp or as funny as he could be. He isn’t really a hero he’s just a star.įor mild comic distraction in a movie that is skimpier than most in generating laughter, there is Minion (David Cross), Megamind’s loyal assistant, who has a fishbowl head, the body of a robot gorilla and a fanged underbite. His jaw is a little too prominent, his body a little too pumped, his attitude a little too cocky for him to be trusted as an unassailable moral paragon. A smug, grinning Superman with a wavy Elvis haircut, he wallows in self-satisfaction as the residents of Metro City heap glory on him. Metro Man (the voice of Brad Pitt) is equally ambiguous. More Conehead than cave man, Megamind, whose lair is an abandoned power plant cluttered with machinery, is a comic antihero for the age of the geek. Voiced by Will Ferrell, Megamind is a hyper-sensitive brainiac who sounds a little like Stewie Griffin, the weirdly effete child played by Seth MacFarlane in “Family Guy” (whose British accent is said to have been inspired by Rex Harrison). My first reaction to a singer whose clout suggested a crooked finger more than a clenched fist was, “Oh, come off it, little boy.”Īnd so it is with Megamind, the movie’s blue-faced, green-eyed, eggheaded title character, whose grandiose evil schemes usually come to naught and who loses every battle with his not entirely virtuous nemesis, Metro Man. There was always something innately silly in Jackson’s wispy-voiced, childlike affectation of macho ferocity. Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” blasted near the end of “Megamind,” the witty 3-D animated deconstruction of superhero movies from DreamWorks Animation, encapsulates the paradoxes of a story in which evil morphs into good and vice versa.
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